selves fortunate
if they lose a girl or two overboard. The boys, or "bull" children, as
they are termed, meet with rather more care relatively speaking. As,
from the nature of their occupation, but little time can be devoted to
nursing--the mother being compelled to constant labour at the oar--the
child is slung on to her back, and, as she moves to and fro with the
stroke of the oar, the babe's soft face bobs in unison against its
mother's back, a fact which will perhaps explain how it is that the
lower class Chinese wear their noses flattened out on their two cheeks
rather than in the prominent position usually selected by that organ.

It is amazing how wonderfully quick the Chinese pick up a colloquial
foreign tongue; the same tailor for instance experiencing no difficulty
in making himself understood in English, French, Russian, or Spanish;
English, though, is the language par excellence along all the China
seaboard. So universal is it that a foreigner must needs know something
of our tongue to make himself intelligible to the ordinary Chinaman;
and, more remarkable still, there is such a vast difference between the
spoken dialects of north and south China--nay, even between any two
provinces in the "Flowery Land"--that I have known some of our native
domestics from the Canton district, when talking with their countrymen
of Chefoo, communicate their ideas and wants in English, because their
own medium failed them; the difference between the native dialects being
as broad as that between English and Dutch.

Though such a diversity exists _orally_, the _written_ character is
common, and expresses exactly the same idea all over the empire, and
beyond it in Japan, Corea, and the Loo Choo islands.

The Chinese are splendid workmen, providing you can furnish them with a
model or copy, for there is very little genius, properly so-called,
attached to John Chinaman.

Their imitative faculty and powers of memory are really wonderful; as an
instance of the former perhaps the following may not be amiss:--

"In the earlier days of the first occupation, the English residents of
Hong Kong were often placed in difficulties about their clothing,
Chinamen not having attained to that perfection in the tailors' art
which they now have acquired. On one occasion an old coat was supplied
to a native tailor as a guide to the construction of a new one; it so
happened the old garment had a carefully mended rent in its sleeve--a
circumsta